🚀 go-pugleaf

Iomega has just announced the full details of what was codenamed the Viper
Drive. It seems the official name is now Jaz Drive. The features are even
more impressive than rumoured in last week's MacWeek article. It has a
sustained transfer rate of up to 6.73 megabytes per second and a
10-megabyte-per-second synchronous SCSI transfer rate. It delivers 12
millisecond average seek time, 17.5 millisecond average access time and
has a 256 kilobyte read/write cache.

The Jaz drive uses both 540-megabyte and 1 gigabyte disks. Now read on ......

(The new Iomega Ditto tape drives also sound most impressive. Please
advise if you want the press release on these posted here as well).

Happy reading,  John Groves
-------------------------------------------------------
(press release follows):
Iomega's Jaz Drive Sets New Benchmark For Capacity And Performance; Offering
Removable Gigabyte Disks, Unlimited Capacity At Less Than $500

Date: Jun 12, 1995              Time: 11:55 am

ROY, Utah--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 12, 1995--Iomega Corporation (NASDAQ:IOMG)
today announced its new Jaz drive -- a one-gigabyte removable drive that
provides virtually unlimited capacity at prices in line with today's fixed
hard drives, and offers users one of the highest-capacity, fastest and most
versatile disk drives for desktop and mobile computing.

The new drive is capable of storing and playing high quality audio and video
on a single, removable disk, yet affordable enough to provide home and small
office computer users a powerful hard drive upgrade.

The Jaz drive, still under development, is expected to begin shipping by the
end of the year. Street prices are expected to be as low as $499. The new
Jaz drive offers unlimited capacity at hard drive pricing with the added
value of removability. The 3.5-inch gigabyte Jaz disks are expected to sell
as low as $99 each. When users need additional hard drive space, they simply
use another Jaz disk rather than purchasing and installing a new fixed hard
drive.

"With pricing and performance rivaling the best fixed hard drives, the Jaz
drive literally becomes the ultimate hard drive," said Kim B. Edwards,
Iomega president and CEO. "There is no sacrifice on performance, capacity
and pricing for this drive. It is the ideal hard drive upgrade for those
millions of people who will fill up their internal hard drives each year."

Iomega expects the Jaz drive to find considerable acceptance at the high end
of the home and small office/home office markets, where memory intensive
applications such as multimedia, graphics, online services, games, and
education programs make expandable storage a necessity. The Jaz drive is
also ideal for Tpower-user' markets such as video and audio production,
electronic and desktop publishing, graphics, CAD/CAM and Fortune 1000
business. It enables these users to fully exploit multimedia and workgroup
applications or to perform high-speed backup.

The drive is capable of operating with virtually any desktop system ranging
from Windows, Windows 95, Macintosh and OS/2 formats to high-end
workstations. It also bundles at no extra charge a starter Jaz disk
containing Jaz tools, the industry's most comprehensive software solution
for storing, moving and managing information.

A one-gigabyte Jaz disk will store and play:

--  a movie (MPEG1 compressed),
--  up to eight hours of CD quality audio,
--  up to eight minutes of broadcast quality video,
--  up to two hours of MPEG1 compressed DSS satellite quality video,
--  a digital family album of more than 150 4x5 color photographs, or
--  more than 20,000 scanned documents for document imaging.

"People's Mouths Will Water"

"Jaz opens up a new kind of usage for our systems," said Matthias Zahn,
founder of FAST Multimedia, a leading developer of non-linear video editing
systems using the IBM-compatible PC platform. "In one package, it offers the
benefits of a high-capacity hard disk, portability and is as easy and
interchangeable as a VCR tape. But the real key is affordability. Today,
users must pay as much as $1,800 for drives offering far less capability.
Jaz gives them fast, unlimited capacity and portability for about one-third
the cost."

Other users who have tested the Jaz drive echo Zahn's comments.

"People's mouths will water over this," said Charles McConathy, president of
ProMax, an Irvine, California company that provides hard disk arrays in
systems for high-end video and pre-press publishing. "Our customers will get
infinite capacity from disks that are removable and portable for easier
editing and transport and faster transfer rates at a price that is
significantly less than anything on the market."

"Our customers range from hobbyist musicians to recording artists who want
to store digital audio directly onto a high-capacity medium," said Steve
Claflin, vice president of marketing for Ensoniq, a Pennsylvania
manufacturer of electronic music keyboards and multimedia sound cards. "In
the past, this has meant using expensive fixed media. Jaz brings high
capacity and portability, which makes it a real breakthrough for digital
audio recording."

The introduction of the Jaz drive follows on the success of Iomega's
low-priced 100-megabyte Zip drive and Zip disks that were announced last
year and that began shipping earlier this year. The company recently
announced an internal version of the Zip drive.

"The Zip and Jaz drives both deliver the same kind of functionality, but for
significantly different types of users," said Timothy L. Hill, Iomega's vice
president of marketing. "Zip serves the mainstream user seeking a better
personal storage solution as the floppy for the multimedia age, while Jaz is
designed for the demanding high-performance market that desperately needs a
new approach to store, transport or backup vast amounts of data like video
and sound. We think there is a tremendous opportunity in both areas."

Unprecedented Performance

The Jaz drive is simply unmatched in the removable storage industry. With a
sustained transfer rate of up to 6.73 megabytes per second and a
10-megabyte-per-second synchronous SCSI transfer rate, it exceeds the
performance of any removable storage option available today and even exceeds
the performance of most hard drives. It is fast enough to deliver
full-screen, full-motion video. As a backup solution, it can transfer a
gigabyte of information in as little as five minutes, making it ideal for
either desktop or network servers. And the Jaz drive is highly reliable,
offering 250,000 hours of MTBF. The external drive itself is extremely
portable and attractive. Weighing just two pounds, it fits easily into a
briefcase or computer carrying case. True to Iomega's innovative CDI
(Consumer Design Initiative), the Jaz casing is an attractive racing green
color with a clear window to view disk labels. It also is stackable with
other Iomega products, including Zip, Ditto and Bernoulli drives.

The drive uses the latest innovative technology including tri-pad, thin-film
50 percent recording heads, dynamic head loading and drag and drop motorized
cartridge ejection. It delivers 12 millisecond average seek time, 17.5
millisecond average access time and has a 256 kilobyte read/write cache.

The Jaz drive uses both 540-megabyte Jaz disks, at an expected $69 street
price, and gigabyte disks that are expected to sell for as low as $99 in
multi packs. Both capacities use a 3.5-inch form factor and will be
available as individual disks or in multi-packs. The disks will employ a
proprietary anti-rattle design and a dual-platter cartridge.

The drive also has an on/off switch, automatic termination, a full
compliment of SCSI IDUs and is Fast SCSI II compliant.

Already at over 200 test sites in various industries, the Jaz drive is
expected to be available in volume shipments in late 1995 in internal and
external SCSI versions and in the first quarter of 1996 in internal IDE
versions.

Iomega today also introduced the Ditto 420, an entry level tape backup drive
that delivers the industry's highest-capacity for under $100, and two other
high-performance backup drives, Ditto 800 and Ditto 3200, that deliver up to
3.2 gigabytes of backup for about ten cents per megabyte with new Travan(TM)
technology.

The combination of the three product families establishes Iomega as a
significant new force in the computer storage market, offering a full range
of leading-edge products for virtually any desktop and mobile computing
storage requirement. All three product families will be shown at Iomega's
booth (Booth No. 3852) at the PC Expo tradeshow in New York, June 20-22.

Iomega Corporation provides personal computer storage solutions that help
people manage their computer information -- anywhere. These solutions
include the Bernoulli line of removable drives and disks, Ditto tape backup
drives and tape cartridges, Zip drives and disks, and later this year, the
Jaz one-gigabyte drives and disks. Iomega provides storage solutions for the
small office/home office, large business, creative professionals, government
and education markets that are available through computer retail stores,
resellers and major distributors. The company can be reached at 800-MY-STUFF
or 801-778-1000.

Note to Editors: Iomega and Bernoulli are registered trademarks of, and Zip,
Ditto, Jaz, and the Iomega logo are trademarks of, Iomega Corporation. All
other company and product names are marks of their respective companies.
Travan is a trademark of Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing Company.

           CONTACT:  Iomega Corporation
                     A. Cory Maloy, 801/778-3712
                             or
                     Copithorne & Bellows
                     Susan Breshears, 415/975-2216
11:04 ET   JUN 12, 1995

-- 
John Groves
NetSpace Online Systems, Melbourne, Australia
jcgroves@netspace.net.au